The Road to Death

42

“Get down!” Ibrido shouted, shoving Esprë to the bridge’s deck. The ship rocked back from the force of the explosion, throwing her toward the rear railing. She came up hard against it instead of going over it as some of the less fortunate skeletons did.

Ibrido crashed into the railing next to her, and it flashed through Esprë’s mind that she should try to shove him up and over it. He righted himself before she could act on the thought though.

If the bosun hadn’t been strapped to the console—or perhaps chained, it now seemed—Esprë was sure he’d have been knocked away from it too. As it was, his white-knuckled grasp never left the wheel, and the ship started to weave back and forth in an insane effort to avoid another blast.

“Crossbows!” the dragon-elf shouted. “Find your targets, and loose your bolts!”

A group of skeletons gathering near the front of the ship each snatched up a crossbow off a rack of them near the bow, loaded the weapons, and peered down over the prow, hunting for whatever it was that had attacked the ship. Ibrido glanced down at Esprë, who still huddled against the rail, and said, “Stay down!”

With that, the dragon-elf sprinted toward the bow. Esprë scrambled to her feet and peered out over the bridge to watch him run. She noticed he had the strange loping gait of a large lizard.

Before Ibrido could reach the bow, though, the Karrnathi skeletons seemed to find a target. A handful of them loosed their crossbows toward the ground, and the sound of someone’s dying wail rewarded them.

Esprë looked over at the bosun, who seemed to be smiling, or perhaps he bore a grimace of pain. She wondered if he might help her if she freed him.

Before that could happen, though, another explosion went off. This time, it came from underneath the ship, to the starboard side. It lifted the airship up several feet in the air, knocking Esprë to her knees.

Then, before she could recover, the ship fell toward the ground as if someone had shoved it off the edge of a cliff. Esprë clung to the railing around the bridge as she felt her feet lift up off the bridge, and she screamed right along with the bosun’s wordless voice.

Esprë was sure that this was her death. The airship would smash into the mountain’s face and then tumble down the quarter mile to the foothills. If she was lucky, she’d be thrown clear before the restraining arcs holding the elemental ring of fire in place broke. When that happened, the explosion would make whatever had knocked the airship from the sky seem like a distant thunderclap. It would consume the entire ship and anything near it.

“No!” Esprë shouted at the bosun as the ship plummeted to the rocks below. “Up! Up! Up!”

Just before the ship smashed into the mountainside, the ring of fire managed to reconstitute itself, and the craft came to a bouncing stop. Esprë didn’t know how near they were to the ground, but she suspected it was far too close.

The hard stop hurled Esprë to the deck. She landed flat on her chest, knocking the air from her lungs. It took her a moment before she could reach her feet again.

When she did, she saw Ibrido standing at the ship’s bow, shouting for a skeleton landing party to disembark. “Go!” he said to them. “Get those dwarves! Kill them all! Make them pay!”

The skeletons slipped over the gunwales on thin ropes, sliding down faster than any flesh-covered hands could manage. Some of them carried crossbows, but all of them bore long, curved scimitars as well. A few of them clamped the blades in their teeth before taking the rope in their hands and diving overboard to the ground below.

Esprë heard shouts from below and the clash of metal on metal. She rushed to the railing on the starboard side of the bridge and looked down to see what was happening. There, on the mountainside, she saw a pair of skeletons pull a screaming dwarf from his hiding place and start carving him into pieces. Another dwarf—this one with a long, silver beard he kept tucked into his wide, leather belt—leaped into the fray with a double-handed grip on his heavy warhammer. With a single, mighty swing, he shattered the helmet of one skeleton and the skull hiding beneath it.

The other turned and stabbed the dwarf right through the thigh. He fell backward, clutching his injured leg and tumbling down the mountainside. Esprë thought perhaps he was the lucky one. A third skeleton came up to join the other, and together they made quick work of the cowardly dwarf, who’d gone from screaming to simple whimpering as he tried to hide behind his shield. The skeletons systematically tore the dwarf’s defense to pieces and then continued to do the same to him without a pause.

Esprë gasped in horror but found herself unable to turn away. Ever since she’d realized that her dragonmark was the Mark of Death, she’d become more and more interested in how people died, and she’d rarely seen a battle like this. She’d witnessed the conflict in Construct, but that had been Kandler and the others fighting for their lives against those two warforged titans and the juggernaut known as Bastard.

Somehow, the struggle going on below her seemed much more personal and real. Perhaps it was her gods’-eye perspective on the battlefield. From her vantage point, she could see no fewer than five different hard-fought conflicts pitting dwarf against skeleton, the desperate living against the implacable undead.

The dwarves grunted, cursed, spit, and bled as they fought. They panted loudly as they swung their hammers and axes. They cried out in pain when injured, and they roared in victory when they struck a solid blow against their foes.

In contrast, the skeletons uttered not a word. The only sound they made was the rattling of their bones in their armor and the clash of their blades on the shields, the weapons, and even the flesh of their foes. The dead dealt death and misery wherever they went, but they took no joy in it, and their compatriots shed no tears when they fell. They were only tools made of bone, emotionless contraptions forged from the violated remains of the dead and turned into killing machines.

Esprë watched as one dwarf tossed another over his shoulder—wounded or dead, she couldn’t tell—and shouted for a retreat. His words came too late for many of his fellows. Some of them already lay dead, and others could not break away from their foes for fear of being struck down as they fled.

One dwarf faced with a pair of skeletons decided to give running a try. Even though he had been born to this rugged land and could climb the slopes better than a mountain ram, the longer-legged skeletons chased him down within only a few yards. One of them slashed him across the back of his legs, hamstringing him, and he fell to his knees with a bitter roar. He struck back with his warhammer, smashing his attacker’s rib cage and spine to tiny bits.

The creature’s entire structure gave way, and it collapsed on top of the dwarf, showering him with bones. As it fell, its compatriot hacked into the terrified dwarf’s arm, cutting through sinew to the bone. His weapon fell away from his useless hand and tumbled back down the slope, far out of his reach.

The dwarf roared in frustration and hurled himself at the skeleton with his one good arm, blood trailing behind him from his other arm and legs. He fell upon the creature, and the two rolled down the slope in an uncontrollable double cartwheel. The spectacular fall ended only when the pair cascaded off a small ridge and came smashing down onto the rocks below. The dwarf landed atop the skeleton, smashing it to pieces, but he smacked his own head open on a pointed rock as he went, dashing his brains behind him.

Esprë screamed as a rough, scaly hand landed on her shoulder. She spun about, terrified, to find Ibrido staring down at her with his unblinking eyes. He bared his teeth at her, and she cringed.

“It is beautiful, is it not?” he said to her. “The ballet of battle, the dance of death. It is poetry at its most savage and desperate, each stanza featuring a victor and a vanquished.”

“It’s horrible,” Esprë said. “Disgusting.”

Ibrido nodded. “It is all that and more, but somehow you can’t bring yourself to stop watching it, can you?”

The dragon-elf’s words rang true, but Esprë refused to admit it, even to herself. The sight of the battle had frozen her with fear, she told herself. She wasn’t some kind of voyeur of death. Right?

Esprë curled up on the deck, hugging her knees to her chest and closing her eyes. The dragonmark between her shoulder blades began to burn. She wondered if it had some kind of a mind of its own. Would it start talking to her someday, if it grew large or powerful enough? Or would that just be her mind cracking if that happened?

With all that pounded at her these days, she sometimes feared for her sanity. She didn’t think she could be blamed if it somehow gave way. She was far too young to be expected to carry such a burden as her dragonmark, and the series of kidnappings, and the fact that a continent—or perhaps two—full of the most dangerous creatures in the world wanted her, and everyone who could possibly be related to her dead.

Esprë threw back her head and screamed. The ear-piercing blast forced Ibrido to step back and cover his ears. The sound hurt Esprë’s head, which made her scream even louder and longer, as she channeled every bit of her frustration and fear into it.

At that moment, Esprë was sure that Kandler, Te’oma, Burch, Xalt, and Sallah would never catch up with her. She was on her own, and she was doomed to be torn to pieces—physically, mentally, and spiritually—by the most ancient and evil inhabitants of Eberron.

The dark powers of the Mark of Death surged into Esprë’s hands, freezing them into the shapes of claws. They glowed black with her unimpeded wrath, and the color—or absence of it—snaked up around her arms and danced across her shoulders.

Ibrido stepped back at the sight of the vengeful young elf, and for the first time she saw fear in his reptilian eyes. A laugh leaped to her lips and burst from her mouth in savage delight as she jumped to her feet and reached for the dragon-elf.

“You do not know the powers you toy with,” she told Ibrido as she stretched toward him, determined to put an end to him, no matter what the skeletons might do to her afterward. They would be too late to save him, and at the moment that seemed it would be enough.

Ibrido’s fist flashed out and caught Esprë squarely on the chin. She went sprawling back onto the bridge’s railing, blood spiraling out from her face. Before she could recover, the dragon-elf waded in under her defenses and beat her senseless.

Esprë felt her power fading, waning from her under Ibrido’s relentless battery. She tried to grab at him again, but he knocked her to the ground with a blow to her temple, and all the fight ran out of her.

“Neither,” Ibrido said, as she collapsed to the deck, “do you.”